November 2004
Nanotech on Display
South Korea's Samsung leads the race to perfect flat-panel TVs built with carbon nanotubes. Will they be nanotech's first commercial hit?
By Charles C. Mann
In the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, south of Seoul, South Korea, what looks from a distance like an ordinary 38-inch television plays an endless loop of commercials for James Bond movies. Like the displays increasingly common in American homes, it is a big, flat rectangle of color and motion in a high-tech plastic frame. But unlike the images on an ordinary TV, the ones on this lab model are generated by a layer of carbon nanotubes shooting electrons at a phosphor screen like so many tiny cannonballs. Around the world, television screens are emblems of stodgy domesticity. But this one is in the vanguard of tomorrow's nanotechnological revolution: it could be the first commercial product that brings nanoscale electronics into the middle-class home.
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